The People vs. Tech

POWER cuts can have their advantages.
Recently, when the electricity to my house failed for a few hours, I had a
respite from being ‘plugged in’ to the digital world. My mind rested, and I
realized how full of useless energy my brain was when
engaged with digital technology.

This discovery was personally important
but minor compared with the insidious effects of technology on our political
world. In his exploration of how the internet is destroying democracy, Jamie
Bartlett, tech blogger for the Spectator
and director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social
Media at the cross-party think tank Demos, deftly
points out the ways that technology is making us political infants, prey to new
monopolies and tyrannies. He admits that technology has made us more informed,
wealthier and in some ways happier. However, he goes on to point out the six
pillars that make democracy work (active independent citizenry capable of moral
judgements; a shared culture and a spirit of compromise; free elections;
manageable levels of equality; a competitive economy and independent civil
society; and a sovereign authority that can enforce the people’s will but
remains accountable to them) and shows how digital technology is destroying
almost every one of them. Clearly this also has important
ramifications for the meeting of individual emotional needs.

The attacks are on several fronts. First
of all, our attention is being harvested for profits. Algorithms are developed
that monitor us digitally and learn more about us than we know ourselves. The extent of this is quite alarming to discover. The
results are then used to influence our behaviour and direct where our attention
goes in the future, all in the name of profits.

Second, sophisticated analysis of digital
information (analytics) means that every election is now ‘datafied’. Each
person can be attended to directly in the digital world. This hyper-personalisation
permits politicians to make different promises to different universes of people
without cost. A common political culture is replaced by fragmentation as new,
sometimes foreign, agencies warp traditional political patterns. For example, Russian
bots (automated software programs) post on both sides of the gun control
argument in the US, because “if the American people are arguing, the Russian
government believes it is winning”.

Third, technology is resulting in an
increase in tribalisation. Because opinion in the
digital world is unchecked and there is no mitigating framework online, tribal tendencies
bred into us in the savannah for useful purposes are encouraged to go rogue,
creating hugely malign them-and-us situations. The result is that
representative government, with its checks and balances, is mortally weakened.

If that’s not enough, these analytics will
also soon go to scale, tapping data everywhere, from our smart fridges to the collars
around our pets’ necks. By understanding our environment through this
information, big tech can anticipate, even create, our expectations, and so autonomy
goes out the window.

Furthermore, as artificial intelligence
takes over a range of jobs, a ‘barbell economy’ arises, composed of rich and
poor with a withered middle class in between, resulting in a shrinking tax base.
The dissatisfied lower side of the barbell experiences mental illness and lower
life expectancy, and increased crime rates. Politically, all of this means that
a small number of companies, or a government for that matter, can take control
over the structure and content of public debate: they set it; we respond. The
result is ‘convenience addicts’ who wait to be told what to do politically.

Clearly, autonomy, attention and
belonging (to a common culture) – all human givens – are annihilated by this
brave new world. In addition, there is the loss of solitude and privacy that
the social media world encourages. Ultimately, this new world also affects our need
for meaning. Social media is about performance and appearing successful, whereas real learning involves failure and
making real life mistakes; tough decisions define us and create our character.
It will be difficult to stretch ourselves in a world where there is little
risk, where all is decided for us. If we design machines that make smarter and
wiser decisions than we do, we somehow become their subordinates. Already
decisions that have moral implications, such as teacher evaluations or the
distribution of police officers, are being made by machines. The logical end
point of all this ‘dataism’ is that we each become a unique, predictable and
targetable data point. As human givens are damaged, the human being disappears.

Bartlett lists many possible solutions to
this problem, from breaking the digital advertising model and information
collection by strengthening privacy settings to, interestingly, a robot tax. He
also recommends keeping a human contribution to every technological advancement
and every decision. We can then remain influencers of our future. Good though
they are, his ideas may not be enough. Democracy is ill equipped to handle the
problems described; civil protests and a weak independent media are no match
for this slow drift towards ‘techno-authoritarianism’.

I speculate that something more
revolutionary may be needed, a basic shift of focus from profits and
stimulation to putting human beings and their needs and capacities at the
centre of politics. This seems like a tall demand, but in some ways nothing
could be more plain and simple. As Bartlett himself suggests, there needs to be
a shift from an attention economy to one of human value; should society be run
by technology or by the people? It is amazing that we even have to ask the
question. The most basic obstacle, however, may be our own passivity, and our
growing inability to imagine a world without the use of these instruments. As
Bartlett concludes, “Many of us won’t notice, and those who do mostly won’t care”
where we are heading.

It is a great irony that we have managed
to spread out from the savannah, build pyramids and complex societies, launch
spacecraft and navigate our solar system only to lose our souls to our own
technological development. After reading this excellent and highly
thought-provoking book, I think I will find myself wishing, and praying, for the
next power cut.

This review was written by John Bell and first appeared in the Human Givens Journal, vol. 25, no. 2, 2018.